What is themes in qualitative research? What are emerging themes in qualitative research? How do you define categories? What is the example of category? What are the 3 categories according to definition? What are the four types of definition? What are the example of lexical?
What are lexical skills? What is a lexical syllabus? Previous Article Can I start blogging for free? Another justification for using a priori themes is that the importance of certain issues in relation to the topic being researched is so well-established that one can safely expect them to arise in the data. The main benefit of using a priori themes is that they can help to accelerate the initial coding phase of analysis, which is normally very time-consuming.
There are also some important dangers associated with their use, which you need to bear in mind. Strauss displayed the relationships among these ideas by writing the concepts on a page of paper and connecting them with lines and explanations.
A more formal analysis of word frequencies can be done by generating a list of all the unique words in a text and counting the number of times each occurs. Computers can easily generate word-frequency lists from texts and are a quick and easy way to look for themes. Ryan and Weisner asked fathers and mothers of adolescents: "Describe your children.
In your own words, just tell us about them. Mothers were more likely than fathers to use words like friends, creative, time, and honest; fathers were more likely than mothers to use words like school, good, lack, student, enjoys, independent, and extremely. Ryan and Weisner used this information as clues for themes that they would use later in actually coding the texts. Another way to find themes is to look for local terms that may sound unfamiliar or are used in unfamiliar ways.
Patton , refers to these as "indigenous categories" and contrasts them with "analyst-constructed typologies. Understanding indigenous categories and how they are organized has long been a goal of cognitive anthropologists. The basic idea in this area of research is that experience and expertise are often marked by specialized vocabulary. For example, Spradley recorded conversations among tramps at informal gatherings, meals, card games, and bull sessions. As the men talked to each other about their experiences, there were many references to making a flop.
Spradley combed through his recorded material and notes looking for verbatim statements made by informants about his topic. On analyzing the statements, he found that most of the statements could fit into subcategories such as kinds of flops , ways to make flops , ways to make your own flop , kinds of people who bother you when you flop , ways to make a bed , and kinds of beds. Spradley then returned to his informants and sought additional information from them on each of the subcategories.
Key-words-in-context KWIC are closely associated with indigenous categories. KWIC is based on a simple observation: if you want to understand a concept, then look at how it is used.
In this technique, researchers identify key words and then systematically search the corpus of text to find all instances of the word or phrase. Each time they find a word, they make a copy of it and its immediate context.
Themes get identified by physically sorting the examples into piles of similar meaning. The concept of deconstruction is an abstract and often incomprehensible term used by social scientists, literary critics and writers in the popular press. Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, refused to define it. To Derrida, the meaning of any text is inherently unstable and variable. Wiener was curious as to how the concept of deconstruction was used in the popular press.
He found the term used in by everything from Entertainment Weekly to the American Banker. Wiener concludes that:. Most often writers use "deconstruction" as a fancy word for "analysis" or "explanation," or else as an upscale synonym for "destruction.
Word-based techniques are typically a fast and efficient ways to start looking for themes. We find that they are particularly useful at early stages of theme identification. These techniques are also easy for novice researchers to apply. Scrutiny-based techniques are more time-intensive and require a lot of attention to details and nuances. The compare and contrast approach is based on the idea that themes represent the ways in which texts are either similar or different from each other.
They read each line or sentence and ask themselves, "What is this about? Researchers compare pairs of texts by asking "How is this text different from the preceding text?
Besides identifying indigenous themes—themes that characterize the experience of informants—researchers are interested in understanding how textual data illuminate questions of importance to social science.
Spradley — suggested searching interviews for evidence of social conflict, cultural contradictions, informal methods of social control, things that people do in managing impersonal social relationships, methods by which people acquire and maintain achieved and ascribed status, and information about how people solve problems.
To facilitate this, they offer a useful tool called the conditional matrix. The conditional matrix is a set of concentric circles, each level corresponding to a different unit of influence.
At the center are actions and interactions. The inner rings represent individual and small group influences on these actions, and the outer rings represent international and national effects. Querying the text as a social scientist is a powerful technique because investigators concentrate their efforts on searching for specific kinds of topics — any of which are likely to generate major social and cultural themes. By examining the data from a more theoretical perspective, however, researchers must be careful that they do not overfit the data — that is, find only that for which they are looking.
There is a trade-off between bringing a lot of prior theorizing to the theme-identification effort and going at it fresh.
Prior theorizing, as Charmaz says , can inhibit the forming of fresh ideas and the making of surprising connections. Assiduous theory-avoidance brings the risk of not making the connection between data and important research questions. Novice researchers may be more comfortable with the tabula rasa approach. More seasoned researchers, who are more familiar with theory issues, may find the social science query approach more compatible with their interests.
The final scrutiny-based approach we describe works in reverse from typical theme identification techniques. Instead of identifying themes that emerge from the text, investigators search for themes that are missing in the text. Much can be learned from a text by what is not mentioned.
As early as , propaganda analysts found that material not covered in political speeches were sometimes more predictive that material that was covered George Sometimes silences indicate areas that people are unwilling or afraid to discuss.
For instance, women with strong religious convictions may fail to mention abortion during discussions of birth control. In power-laden interviewers, silence may be tied to implicit or explicit domination Gal In a study of birth planning in China, Greenhalgh surveyed 1,ever-married women, gathered social and economic histories from families.
She conducted in-depth interviews with present and formal officials known as cadres , and collected documentary evidence from local newspapers, journals and other sources. Greenhalgh notes that "Because I was largely constrained from asking direct questions about resistance, the informal record of field notes, interview transcripts, and questionnaire data contains few overt challenges to state policy I believe that in their conversations with us, both peasants and cadres made strategic use of silence to protest aspects of the policy they did not like.
Cadres, for example were loathe to comment on birth-planning campaigns; peasant women were reluctant to talk about sterilization. These silences form one part of the unofficial record of birth planning in the villages. More explicit protests were registered in informal conversations. From these interactions emerged a sense of profound distress of villagers forced to choose between a resistance that was politically risky and a compliance that violated the norms of Chinese culture and of practical reason Other times, absences may indicate primal assumptions made by respondents.
Spradley noted that when people tell stories, they assume that their listeners share many assumptions about how the world works and so they leave out information that "everyone knows. Price takes this observation and builds on it. Thus, she looks for what is not said in order to identify underlying cultural assumptions. Price finds the missing pieces by trying to translate what people say in the stories into something that the general public would understand.
Of all the scrutiny-based techniques, searching for missing information is the most difficult. There are many reasons people do not mention topics. Distinguishing between when informants are unwilling to discuss topics and when they assume the investigator already knows about the topic requires a lot of familiarity with the subject matter.
In addition to word- and scrutiny-based techniques, researchers have used linguistic features such as metaphors, topical transitions, and keyword connectors to help identify themes. The emphasis on metaphor owes much to the pioneering work by Lakoff and Johnson and the observation that people often represent their thoughts, behaviors, and experiences with analogies. Naomi Quinn has analyzed hundreds of hours of interviews to discover concepts underlying American marriage and to show how these concepts are tied together.
She began by looking at patterns of speech and at the repetition of key words and phrases, paying particular attention to informants' use of metaphors and the commonalities in their reasoning about marriage. See editing example. The first step is to get to know our data. This might involve transcribing audio , reading through the text and taking initial notes, and generally looking through the data to get familiar with it. Next up, we need to code the data.
An extract from one interview looks like this:. Each code describes the idea or feeling expressed in that part of the text. At this stage, we want to be thorough: we go through the transcript of every interview and highlight everything that jumps out as relevant or potentially interesting.
As well as highlighting all the phrases and sentences that match these codes, we can keep adding new codes as we go through the text. These codes allow us to gain a a condensed overview of the main points and common meanings that recur throughout the data.
Themes are generally broader than codes. In our example, we might start combining codes into themes like this:. Other codes might become themes in their own right. We want to create potential themes that tell us something helpful about the data for our purposes.
Now we have to make sure that our themes are useful and accurate representations of the data. Here, we return to the data set and compare our themes against it. Are we missing anything?
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